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Counterpoints: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are two of the most profitable films ever made because their production costs were in the five to six figure range. These are particularly pronounced examples of the general tendency for horror films to be cheap as chips to make (audiences don't expect big stars, casts tend to be small, geographic isolation is usually a necessity for story reasons which limits the amount of locations you need to use etc.) - the most beloved slasher films from the 70s and 80s were made for small budgets. More recently, Unfriended was made for $1 million and shot entirely in the director's house. Blumhouse's entire business model is "find directors who seem creative and enthusiastic, give them $1-4 million, almost all of the resulting projects will break even and a few will be whales".
See also Kevin Smith, who launched a successful directing career by making an indie comedy, Clerks, for $27,000 (half of which went to licensing the soundtrack) which he funded by selling off his comic book collection. Or Shane Carruth, who created one of the most critically acclaimed sci-fi movies of this century (Primer) for $7,000. Or just take a look at this list: you may be surprised to find that at least one film you love cost less than a house (or even a new car) to make.
"Yeah, making a movie used to be cheap but now it's more expensive."
Bullshit. Digital cameras are the norm now, so you don't even need to pay for film stock (as at least 3 of the 5 examples above did). Non-specialist consumer electronics are good enough that at least two critically acclaimed and profitable movies that I know of (Tangerine and Unsane) were entirely shot on iPhones, and editing an entire feature film on a standard laptop is perfectly feasible (and you'll probably be using the exact same NLE that the editor for Marvel 36: Electric Boogaloo used).
Sound of Freedom is a poor example of how cheap movies can get insofar as a) it was filmed in two countries and b) it features a bankable movie star who probably was unwilling to work for scale. It would not surprise me one iota if Jim Caviezel's fee cost more than the rest of the production combined. This has precedent: Glass was a nominally $20 million film that looked like it cost one-tenth of that because it had Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.
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